“Don’t Be Alarmed”: Army Trains MPs To Drive Tanks On U.S. Streets

St Louis City residents have been warned to not be alarmed at the sight of U.S. Army tanks rolling down residential neighborhoods after sightings of the vehicles provoked fears of martial law.

The exercise is part of a U.S. Army program run by military police from Fort Meade, Maryland focused around training MPs from St. Louis how to drive heavily armored tanks “on highways and on city streets.”

Sightings of the tanks prompted hundreds of residents to flood news channel KSDK’s Facebook page, with some expressing fears that martial law had arrived with others promising to “stop and salute” the tanks as they rolled by.

Reporting that he was told by the Army not to disclose the location of where the exercise was operating out of for “security reasons,” KSDK reporter Casey Nolan downplayed the exercise as “not such a big deal.”

U.S. Army Sergeant Cornelius Ivory discouraged citizens from taking video and photographs of the tanks and urged them not to get too close.

“They need to know to stay away from it,” Ivory told KSDK.

The exercise will run from June 21-28 in St. Louis, with the presence of the tanks being most noticeable in the area of the sixth district.

As we have exhaustively documented, the increasing shift towards domestic militarization of law enforcement is part of the acclimation process to get Americans comfortable with the idea of troops and tanks on the streets as a routine occurrence.